Multi-Domain Ontology

DBpedia is one of the largest multi-domain ontologies that currently exist. Compared to other ontologies which usually only cover specific domains, are created by relatively small groups of knowledge engineers, and are very cost intensive to keep up-to-date as domains change, DBpedia has several advantages:

DBpedia covers many domains and contains lots of instances.

DBpedia represents real community agreement.

DBpedia (automatically) evolves as Wikipedia changes.

Disadvantages of DBpedia, compared to hand-crafted ontologies like SUMO, OpenCyc, or Wordnet, include:

DBpedia is less formally structured.

DBpedia data quality is lower and includes inconsistencies.

One approach to combine the advantages of both worlds is to interlink DBpedia with hand-crafted ontologies such as OpenCyc, SUMO, or WordNet, which enables applications to use the formal knowledge from these ontologies together with the instance data from DBpedia.

Interlinking DBpedia with these ontologies could further extend query capabilities. For instance, knowing that "cities are geographic places" and "mountains are geographic places", a query engine could return cities as well as mountains for a query about geographic places.